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White told reporters during this afternoon's UFC Fight Night 26 media scrum (video here) that he'll talk to Askren about a future inside the Octagon, which means Bellator may need to pull out all the stops to keep the 170-pound champion, whose contract came to a close following his recent thrashing of Andrey Koreshkov.

This means Askren is now in the exclusive negotiating period of his contract. He'll have some time where only Bellator can discuss a new deal and if that comes to an end, he'll transition to the matching period where he can field offers from other promotions like UFC.

The caveat is Bellator will also have the right to match any deal from elsewhere if they should choose. This is what happened with Eddie Alvarez and his tedious situation.

One can only hope something similar doesn't occur with Askren.

Regardless of the outcome, the Roufusport team member has the ball in his court and will be looking to parlay this into what is best for him and his growing brand. He would fit in well with a stacked UFC welterweight division and make for a potentially intriguing match-up against fellow grappling extraordinaire, Georges St. Pierre.

UFC should have kept raising the money for Eddie til it broke Bellator.

Problem is if they overpay for Eddie then the rest of the UFC roster expects raises or becomes really disgruntled. With Viacom's deep pockets backing Bellator now the bidding war would have just gotten stupid anyways.

I don't care if he deserves to be there. I don't care if he will make the division deeper. I don't care if he will weed out the pretenders who have huge holes in their skill set. All I care about is that he isn't super fun to watch, and that I have the attention span of a gold fish.

I'd like to see Askren in the UFC, if for no other reason than to see if be can back up the claims he makes about being able to beat GSP. Of course there are other extremely talented fighters lurking in the division. If he did sign, I'd really like to see him fight Rory Mac for his debut, if Rory hasn't captured the title by then.